Chapter 8 #3
"It's not the first time someone has sought to kill me," Vaike continues, and his voice is low and steady, the cadence deliberate, grounding, each word chosen for its weight and its warmth.
"And it won't be the last. These are the parts of being a Warlord that no one tells you about when you're a boy.
" A pause, and his arms tighten. "I am very hard to kill, Evran. "
A sound escapes Evran's throat, half laugh, half sob, raw and shaky and real, the sound of terror receding and leaving nothing behind but exposed nerves and the trembling aftermath of adrenaline draining from a body that has nowhere left to put it.
He presses his face harder into Vaike's shoulder and breathes, and breathes, and tries to make his body understand what his mind already knows: that Vaike is alive, that the threat is gone, that they are safe.
But the truth of it sits beneath the relief, heavy and inescapable.
This man saved him. This man took him from a life of servitude and humiliation and gave him a home, gave him purpose, gave him love so unconditional that Evran still does not fully know what to do with it.
This man carved beads from stone and wove them into his hair and called him husband in a firelit corridor and meant it with every part of himself.
This man woke in the dark and put his body between Evran and a poisoned blade without a second's hesitation, without calculation, without any thought beyond the instinct that says you do not touch what is mine.
And Evran cannot be without him.
The understanding has always been there, has lived in him since the first weeks at the stronghold when he began to realize that what Vaike was offering was not obligation or pity but genuine, chosen, fierce devotion.
But it has never cut this deep, never been this urgent, this visceral.
His body rejects the mere possibility of Vaike's absence, recoils from it with a violence that is physical and total.
His lungs constrict and his chest aches at the thought of waking up and reaching out and finding nothing beside him, nothing but cold sheets and silence and a world that has lost the only person who ever made it bearable.
He does not know how to be without this man.
He has built his entire new life around the foundation of Vaike's steadiness, Vaike's strength, Vaike's hands on him in the dark saying I have you, you are safe, you are mine.
He clings to him and does not let go.
"Who could have done this?" he whispers.
Vaike is quiet for a long moment. His hand moves slowly through Evran's hair, careful around the braid, stroking the loose strands at the back of his neck.
"It could have been anyone," he says finally.
"There are plenty who don't agree with my rule.
Plenty who think they could do better, or that my seat is not rightfully mine.
" His voice is matter-of-fact, carrying no bitterness, spoken as though this reality has been with him so long it is as unremarkable as the weather.
"This is the risk of power. You hold it, and others want it, and some of them are willing to kill for it. "
Evran closes his eyes. Vaike's heartbeat is steady beneath his ear, slow and strong, already past the crisis and filed away and moved on.
Evran has not moved on. Evran is nowhere close to moving on.
Privately, in the dark behind his eyelids, he thinks: maybe. Maybe it could have been anyone.
But he knows of at least one person who was vocal about it.
Torsten's face surfaces in his mind, the light brown hair, the easy smile, the hand on his braid.
Sometimes a rule can end without warning.
The casual confidence of speaking about the end of someone's reign as though it is inevitable, as though he has already seen it happen and is merely waiting for reality to catch up.
An opportunist who is there at the right time.
The words play through Evran's memory with a clarity that feels deliberate, as though they were always meant to be remembered, as though Torsten spoke them knowing they would take on new weight when the blade came through the window.
Evran's jaw tightens. He presses closer to Vaike and says nothing.
The fire has gone completely cold. The room is dark and still, the secured window a black rectangle, the doubled guards a muffled presence beyond the door.
Vaike holds him, steady and unshakeable, and eventually the trembling stops, slowly, reluctantly, in degrees, his body giving up its protest not because it has been convinced but because it has been exhausted.
They do not go back to bed. They sit together on the edge of it, tangled in each other, and Vaike's hand moves through Evran's hair in slow, rhythmic passes, and the night turns toward morning outside the shuttered window.
Evran does not sleep again. His mind is too full, full of purple-tinged blades and easy smiles and the cold, crystallizing knowledge that someone at this summit wants his husband dead and is willing to act on it.
He holds Vaike's hand against his chest and watches the darkness lighten, degree by degree, and thinks about what he is willing to do to keep this man alive.
The answer, when it comes, is simple and absolute and utterly without reservation: anything, everything, whatever it takes.